An Oakville woman who fell ill in late March and was tested for COVID-19 says she’s puzzled and frustrated that more than three weeks and countless phone calls later, she still doesn’t have her result.
Lynda Sherry started to feel a sore throat, a dry persistent cough and shortness of breath on March 23.
She said she thought it was just the flu but called her family doctor on March 26 when her symptoms got worse.
Her doctor referred her to Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital for a COVID-19 test on March 27.
“They said we will contact you with your results in seven to ten days,” Sherry said they told her at the hospital.
Ten days went by and Sherry, still not feeling great, called Halton Region Public Health. She said she was always told that regardless of her result, positive or negative, she would be hearing back from someone.
They then told her to call her family doctor who could reach her result on some internal online portal, which she did.
But neither he nor public health had her result.
“It’s almost a moot point for me whether I had it or not – I am still staying in the house until I get better,” Sherry said.
She lives in a townhome with her husband and an adult daughter, who has decided to decamp to the basement until she gets some certainty on whether mom has or had the virus.
“We don’t have Chris Cuomo’s house where it’s luxurious – she only comes upstairs when I have wiped everything down,” Sherry said, referring to the well-known CNN presenter who is recovering from COVID-19 in what appears on television to be a palatial basement.
Her husband is sleeping in another room.
Sherry said that during numerous polite calls with various nurses and other staff with Halton Public Health, she was repeatedly told that a several-week wait for test results was normal.
They told her that since her test was conducted during the time where the provincial backlog for testing reached 11,000 specimens, and that she wasn’t a healthcare worker, her test would have to wait.
Halton Region spokesperson Julia Le said Sherry’s circumstance “would be considered an unusual situation.”
“Public Health is aware that there was a large backlog in late March for processing tests due to the large volume of tests.”
Le says that as of mid-April, Halton Public Health is only contacting people whose tests come back positive.
But at the time Sherry was tested, it was standard protocol to respond to all patients to indicate to them whether the test was positive or negative.
She said that with testing capacity greatly improved in Ontario, Halton residents now get positive results via a phone call within 72 hours.
Ontario Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Williams said he is aware test mix-ups were possible, especially in late March, but a three week wait is “not acceptable.”
“I am not trying to make excuses, 20 days is way too long, even seven days and 10 days is way too long,” Williams said on Thursday.
He added that with the expansion of testing capacity using hospital and other labs, the network of labs that have to communicate with each other has grown and communication can be challenging.
“There are sometimes miscues on the data sharing,” he said. “We’ll continue to try to address those – they’re not the common part but it doesn’t mean they’re acceptable.”
Sherry said that what bothers her most is not her own uncertainty about her health, but that her case would have required substantial tracing of close contacts if she was found positive.
“I went to hardware stores, I went shopping, I went thrifting – I met lots of people I knew and hugged and said hello to,” she said of the week's activities prior to feeling sick. “I had friends in my house.”
What’s worse, is she says that testing delays from March must mean the province is missing cases as it decides what to do next.
“They’re making major decisions that are affecting people on old data,” she said. “You don’t know if that curve has flattened or is skyrocketing.”
Ontario’s coronavirus testing has been the subject of much criticism, especially earlier this month when it was revealed the province lagged the rest of Confederation by a considerable margin in tests completed per capita.
There were reports from across Ontario of people with symptoms being turned away from assessment centres due to lack of testing materials.
The Ford government has since vowed to increase testing from about 4,000 tests a day earlier this month to 16,000 per day by early May.
For her part, Sherry, who is still fighting a dry cough, thinks she did not have the novel coronavirus.
But without her test result, she still can’t be sure.
